Fishbone Friday: New DC Activation Gone Wrong

New DC Activation

Welcome supply chain leaders, to the fifth edition of Fishbone Friday!

If you missed last week’s edition where we discussed possible root causes for a high or increasing labor turnover rate, you can find it here.

Let’s get into the topic of the week: New DC activation gone wrong. If there is one thing warehousing and distribution executives hope they will never have to deal with in their lifetimes, it’s a failed or heavily delayed distribution center activation. Now, I’ve been around enough new DC activations – brownfield and greenfield – to know that they never, and I mean never, go completely as planned. While there’s no silver bullet to ensure success when it comes to activating a new distribution facility, there are ways of mitigating the risk of encountering a significant problem.

Now, as our loyal readers of Fishbone Friday know by now, the series was created to explore possible root causes for significant and recurring operational problems. As today’s topic is not something that we would consider as reoccurring (at least we hope not), we’re going to recommend that this exercise be done preemptively, before the conceptual design process and definitely before signing a new lease. Sometimes the risk warrants examining the root cause of a problem before it even happens.

As always, don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter – on the right of your screen for desktop and on the bottom if you’re viewing from a mobile device – to receive your own fishbone brainstorming template, along with some additional helpful resources. Also, don’t forget to hop back to LinkedIn and make sure you’re following Syncontext Supply Chain to keep receiving actionable content just like this.

Find out how a fulfillment optimization system can not only help with the conceptual design and requirement planning of a new fulfillment operation, but also keep it running optimally once it’s been successfully activated.